


Skin Deep

by SagaciousSagittarius



Series: Aroxana Surana, Hero of Ferelden [1]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Post-Dragon Age: Inquisition Quest - Here Lies the Abyss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-03
Updated: 2018-12-03
Packaged: 2019-09-06 08:05:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16828525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SagaciousSagittarius/pseuds/SagaciousSagittarius
Summary: Surana reflects on her lover's death and the new super power in Thedas: the Inquisition.





	Skin Deep

Surana had nearly given up in her search for a cure to the Calling the night she learned of his death. That night seemed to be the longest night of her life, and in that moment, it felt as though even the limited years she had left were too many; too painful to endure.  
For the first time since she was a little girl, Surana was completely and utterly alone. Alistair hadn’t just been her lover, he had been her best friend, her confidant, and her only constant in this ever-changing world. It had been the two of them against the world on more than one occasion, and now it was just her.  
She cursed Corypheus. She cursed the Inquisition, her fellow Grey Wardens, the Maker, and then finally -privately- she cursed herself. But it was useless - blame was useless.  
She gasped in pain as her head throbbed with whispered words and strange music; feeling the blighted blood rushing through her constricting, weakening veins. She steadied herself at her desk, gripping its edges until her knuckles turned white. This was no time to be blaming anyone. This was a time to be focused. She had to give her everything for this cure. For herself, for other wardens. For Alistair.  
She couldn’t let this disease consume her. For Alsitair’s sake, she had to continue with her plans. She had promised him they would be okay.

Alistair’s skin looked sickly. He was paler than she had ever seen him, his eyes lined with worry instead of laughter. He looked weaker to Surana, though he still brandished a sword and shield with the stamina of the nineteen-year-old she had met.  
Surana touched Alistair’s face while he was sleeping, whispering little spells of healing and creation that she had learned at Kinloch Hold from her fellow apprentices practicing “beauty magic”. These spells made your skin moist and healthy, shedding off dead skin, ridding your face of blemishes and the dreadful acne that was such a feared thing in Surana’s early years at the Circle. Remembering this, she smiled and chuckled to herself as she continued to trace runes on Alistair’s cheeks. He snored contentedly; they had had a filling (and gloriously cheesy) dinner at The Crown and Lion and afterwards… well afterwards Surana managed to tire him out in her arms. His snoring was welcome to Surana. He was full, exhausted; his mind only had room for happy thoughts and none for those bad dreams she knew all too well of.  
Stopping her ministrations, Surana climbed out of bed and made her way to her private dressing room. There, in front of the mirror, she performed a cleansing spell on her own face, vanishing the makeup from it. She smirked at the clever uses for cleansing magic she had learned back in Kinloch Hold with her friends, but her smirk vanished as she looked at herself in the mirror.  
She leaned in closer to examine the deep lines which seemed to be getting worse by the minute now. She could see dark blotches staining the skin around her eyes, one particular dark patch ran from her jaw bone to her jugular. Her veins were pronounced and sickly. Her skin was getting paler.  
None of the girls at Kinloch Hold had taught her any spells to help with this, she thought grimly. She had always felt the taint, had always known it was running through her, but now she could see it on her face. She saw the darkness deep under her skin rising to the surface. She felt the blighted blood flowing through her veins with such a force sometimes her body ached from it. She could see the taint mapping its way throughout her body, traveling through her veins.  
She had seen older Wardens before. She knew what the taint looked like years after the Joining. But still she could not look at herself. This tainted blood coursing through her veins and keeping her alive, Surana thought, was not her own blood. This body she was inhabiting was slowly being consumed by the taint. She could not look at this body.  
And somehow Alistair only looked like he had a bad cold.  
She had thought he too was wearing makeup. But, after noticing his confusion at the pots of powders and rouges on her bureau, she realized he wasn’t. Then she had thought that maybe it had something to do with him being human. But again, her theory was disproved when she saw Malloc covered in the same dark blotches, a human man who had completed the Joining two years after Surana herself had. She decided maybe Alistair had the luck of the draw, what with his “royal blood” and all.  
She sighed as she drifted back into the bedroom, looking at Alistair’s sleeping form. Sure, he looked older than his age and a bit weathered, but… Surana put the thought out of her head. Alistair had gone through the same Joining process as she had, and every Warden accepted the Taint in their own way.  
Alistair looked as handsome as the day she met him. “You’re a strange human,” she had said then. She hummed at the memory, sitting on the bed and brushing a stray piece of hair out of her sleeping lovers face.  
Surana’s face could rot off from the bone, her tainted blood could gush out of her in waves; all she wanted was for Alistair to stay exactly like he was in this moment. She would do anything to preserve this moment.  
In the morning, when Alistair awoke, Surana was up and dressed with a fresh face on. They sat in silence for a while, sometimes breaking the tension to discuss some of the finer details of Surana’s search. Alistair didn’t like leaving her. Anger and worry seethed from him as he rubbed his neck and chewed at his nails over tea. But he knew that she must do this without him. It was for the best.  
Their cups were drained and the pantry was exhausted of leftover cakes and sweets. “I’ll be okay,” Surana said, taking Alistair’s hand. “We’ll be okay.”

Surana wasn’t okay. Her skin was now pale, making the harsh veins even more visible; cracking and bleeding as if she’d been scratched by thousands of claws. She unfurled her map of the Deep Roads, using a lantern and inkwell to hold down it’s curled edges desperately trying to recoil. As she scanned the winding paths drawn onto the map that she was all too familiar with, a recruit meekly spoke her name.  
The recruit was a young Dalish woman, her face fresh with valasllin and her long hair pulled back into a braid. She stared with wide-eyes at the Warden Commander as she turned around to face her. This was her first-time meeting face to face with Surana. As the woman turned around, she felt the way she did when she was a child in her clan, learning that a female elven mage was now being called “The Hero of Ferelden”.  
Surana quickly grabbed the envelope that the recruit held for her in her outstretched hand and returned to the dim light of her desk with its maps. She could feel the young girl staring at her and had begun to feel self-conscious. She wasn’t used to this feeling; it was never one she had had back in her days at the Circle. Surana ushered the recruit away with a wave of her hand and touched her own face, feeling the unfamiliar ridges and bumps that now claimed it.  
She tore open the envelope of the letter with her teeth, spitting out the scrap of paper that was torn off.  
It was from the Inquisition.  
They were sorry for her loss.  
It was signed by the Inquisitor herself, and all the higher-ups on her team.  
She saw Leliana’s delicately scrawled signature, and that was enough to get her to start quietly crying.  
She examined the body of the letter more thoroughly now. It was written in a hand she had never seen before – perhaps it was the Inquisitor’s? No, she must have servants and specially trained diplomats to carefully construct her letters for her. The writing seemed ingenuine; too full of apologies and formalities. She’d been around enough people to understand the difference between true sympathy and polite conversation.  
The letter spoke of a feast they wished for her to attend. A feast for the demise of Corypheus. She would be a guest of honor of some sort, and they would put her at the head of a table and everything. Surana crumpled the letter in her hands. She was tired of being a status symbol for the nobility to befriend and then show off. And besides, no matter what that Lavellan seemed to think, Surana was a nobody to the majority of Thedas. She was not the true entertainment at the feast, and she didn’t want to be.  
She wondered about this Inquisitor Lavellan more frequently than she would like to admit. Leliana spoke of her in her letters and seemed to have a great respect for the young girl. Just twenty and in such a high position? Sounded familiar to Surana, but she knew that a small group of Fereldan Grey Wardens was nothing compared to a political institution that’s influence spread across the entirety of Thedas.  
Surana found out through Leliana’s letters that this Lavellan was also an elven mage. However, unlike herself, Lavellan had been raised to be the Keeper of a Dalish clan. Surana remembers hearing about these Keepers for the first time when she was a teenager in the Circle; she remembers thinking they were fake. Surana had always felt that the Dalish were put on such a high pedestal by elves from alienages like herself, and that surely no one of their race actually lived like that. And yet the Dalish did, for the most part.  
She wondered what it must have been like for Lavellan to grow up sleeping under a starry sky instead of staring up at the underside of another apprentice’s bunk bed in the cramped living quarters of the circle.


End file.
